


notes on a journey

by bluewalk



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 07:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluewalk/pseuds/bluewalk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Usopp has trouble breathing in deep space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	notes on a journey

**Author's Note:**

> Birthday fic for [captainkai](http://captainkai.livejournal.com/) over on LJ, who requested a Space AU!

Old Raftel was once just Raftel, back when it was the only one they knew. It had four moons, North and South, East and West, and between them, nothing much but empty space and rays of old, old sunshine. When Raftel began to rot from the inside out, ships left for the moons, carrying people and whatever treasures they could hold.

Usopp, to whom imagination had always come easier than anything else, had imagined monsters burrowing their way back up to the surface of Raftel, now that their sun was dead and the sunlight that reached them was old and feeble.

That's what Usopp would tell the other children, on the East Moon, when his mother was too sick and his father had not come back. And even if the children didn't always believe him, they all knew one thing for certain: Raftel could no longer be a home, and had not been a home for many years.

People turned their attention outward. The Grand Line was an asteroid belt, named such because it was the grandest thing they knew, grander than even their memories of how Raftel had once been green and blue and resplendent, centuries ago. People on ships had disappeared into the Grand Line, never to be seen again. Others had returned and spoke of horrors of the sentient kind, massive things that prowled the avenues between asteroids, black and sleek with eyes like the oyster pearls of myth.

Maybe the Grand Line went so far that if you followed it, and if you survived, all the way to the end, you'd find yourself in another universe, with another Raftel, one that was blue instead of grey, with a sun that was young and bright, still on fire.

Usopp knows it's ridiculous. Usopp also knows that they'll be the ones to find it, this new home, because none of them have anywhere else to go.

 

 

 

Air hunger, they call it, and Usopp's learned it's a term from Old Raftel. Thinking about it makes his throat feel scaly and stiff. He knows there's enough oxygen on board--Franky had checked their supply not two minutes ago, after the last Mariejois ship was gunned down--but Usopp knows many things and they hardly ever make him braver.

For instance, he knows the Thousand Sunny was named for all the sunny days they have never known and god, that's sad, isn't it? Don't, Usopp tells himself, please don't. But he can't stop thinking about it, of mellow yellow suns constricting and expanding, easy and steady in the way his lungs have forgotten. He's getting dizzy, feels himself spiraling like the crew of that last ship, spinning into the stars, too small and too far away for Usopp to make out their frozen blue faces.

Usopp knows the universe is ever expanding (they say so); Usopp knows their bodies will not find a resting place for millennia.

He exhales forcefully and waits, letting his heart hammer in its bone cage.

Air hunger, they call it. He had first read it in one of Chopper's old medical journals, the one where the leather cover has rotted away and the binding was barely holding the moldy pages together. Chopper had salvaged it from the snow on his home planet and didn't dry it out properly, kept it with him in every dark place. The name scribbled on the first page was in blotchy, brown ink: Hiriluk, MD. (Usopp had never seen handwritten text before that, had never learned how to pen his letters himself.)

Certainly doesn't make him feel better to know this hunger has always existed, even back when air was still abundant and free, back when people still said strange things like "just stepping out" and "let's go for a walk." Instead, it makes him feel helpless, relentlessly hunted from the East Moon to wherever they will end up.

The door to his room hisses open and Usopp winces, squeezing his eyes shut. Footsteps stop besides him. The door hissing closed, belatedly.

"Hey, longnose." Sanji's voice, rough.

He grabs onto Sanji's wrist without seeing, feels Sanji's pulse beneath his thumb. It's slow, it's steady, but it's too faint, and Usopp keeps losing it under the drumming of his own. His grip tightens; he's losing feeling. He imagines himself dripping over an edge, imagines the metal floor rippling, the drops resounding.

"Here," Sanji says and--yes, here, all of him, every molecule safe, because Sanji is warm, and Sanji is peeling Usopp's fingers off his wrist and holding them against the pulse in his neck  instead, where Usopp can feel the heat from his blood. "Count. Three, remember?"

"Sorry," Usopp whispers. "Sorry."

"Shut up," Sanji says, his voice at Usopp's fingertips, his strength for Usopp to harness and metabolize into his own. Usopp's breath shudders out of him painfully. He forces himself to wait three beats of Sanji's pulse before taking in another. Exhale, three beats. Sanji's fingers are cool against his skin. Inhale.

Usopp doesn't know how much time has passed, how many threes upon threes, before Sanji pulls him up and props him up against his side.

"Eat now," Sanji says. "Mushroom stew. Your favorite."

"I hate mushrooms," Usopp murmurs. There isn't much conviction in his voice. He feels wrung out, can't put up much of a fight.

"Sorry," Sanji says, not sounding sorry at all, the bastard. "You need the Vitamin D," is his explanation, and that's all he says, because Sanji is kind.

And Sanji's probably taken care to disguise the taste of mushrooms the best he could, for Usopp's sake. Space rations have come a long way since civilization fled Old Raftel, but they still often have the texture of chalk, the soda-y sweetness of artificial sweetener. But Sanji's meals somehow defy all that. Usopp's not supposed to believe in magic in this day and age, but he can't see how else Sanji does it.

Usopp takes the bowl, still hot, and he is spine-meltingly relieved to note that the air hunger has subsided, like all hunger does with the advent of Sanji's bright, yellow head.

"Thanks," he says around a mouthful of stew.

Sanji gets up from the bed and refolds himself into Usopp's desk chair, crossing his long legs at the ankles. Usopp looks at him out of the corner of his eye. Sanji's boots are expertly and his hair is brushed and sleek, like it always is, and Usopp wonders how his own must look. He crawled into bed immediately following the attack this afternoon, and he feels a wave of guilt at that--until he sees Sanji picking up his tablet.

Horror punches through him instead.

"Don't go through my drawings!" he shouts, almost upending the bowl from his lap when he stands. He catches it in time, and it's not so much a result of reflex as it is a deep-seated fear of making Sanji upset.

"Why not, hm?" Sanji hums, unconcerned even as Usopp stomps over. "Unless they're drawings of me," Sanji laughs.

"They're not," Usopp snaps, snatching his tablet away. He stands there for a moment, bowl of stew in one hand and his tablet clutched in the other. He feels puffed up and indignant, like he's ready to breathe fire.

But then Sanji smiles in that way that he does, and Usopp thinks, not for the first time, how dangerous it is that Sanji can look so harmless when he wants to. Just like that, Usopp's anger fizzles out uselessly, leaving him susceptible.

"Eat," Sanji commands, but he doesn't sound as imperious as he usually does. He extracts the tablet from Usopp's grip and Usopp lets him.

Obediently, Usopp continues to shovel spoonfuls of stew into his mouth, managing to grimace only a little. He hovers over Sanji's shoulder as Sanji powers on his tablet and starts scrolling through its contents.

There are a few pages of Nami's mikan trees, the ones she had taken with her when Luffy picked her up from Cocoyashi Colony on the East Moon. Their ancestry is Old Raftel, all the way back. Her adoptive mother had smuggled the seeds with her when she left for the last time. But trees don't grow as well on spaceships, even ingenious ones like Sunny, so Nami's mikan trees are small and the fruit they bear are dry and sour.

Nami loves them all the same and so Usopp had sketched them, trying to understand why.

Next are some quick sketches of Robin's casablanca lilies, half-opened buds already too heavy for their brittle stalks. Robin always picks the best ones, before they have a chance to wilt too quickly, and she crushes them in her fists, breathes deeply from her hands. Robin says you have to know when to cut your losses, especially in deep space, but Usopp is always sad to see the flowers gone the next day.

Still, he likes being in the greenhouse. He likes the florescent lights and and the warmth and the smell of artificial soil shot through with nitrogen. He likes being able to see the stars through the glass dome, even though they're always changing and only Nami knows how to chart them and only Robin knows their stories. These days, though, he finds himself too tired to make it all the way up to the greenhouse. There are too many stairs and he's too claustrophobic for the elevators.

He reads botany books instead, downloaded wirelessly from Robin's extensive library, and he draws what he finds interesting and makes up hybrids and mutant species to pass the time in his room.

"This one has a lot of teeth," Chopper had commented once, when Usopp showed him the drawings in secret, the two of them huddled together as the Sunny dodged asteroids in a turbulent patch of the Grand Line.

"Cool, isn't it? It's a mutated Dionaea muscipula."

Usopp had caught himself too late and wished he could knock his own teeth out. He had said the one word that was off-limits when talking to Chopper, but Chopper only asked softly, "So it talks too?"

"Sure," Usopp had answered without hesitation, carefully not looking at Chopper's antlers or his hooves. "Absolutely."

And because Chopper had looked so happy, Usopp had immediately set about adding lungs and tongue and brain-- too advanced for a chlorophyll-based being, but he didn't care. Chopper had tapped his hooves together as he watched Usopp work, and kept quiet about complicated things like nervous systems and muscle and memory. The final 3D rendering was downloaded onto Chopper's tablet, and Usopp hears Chopper pull it up sometimes to listen to it quack its programmed lines in Usopp's voice.

There are pages upon pages of such creations: plants with gaping maws and sentient vines that bind and plants with sweet-looking flowers that simpered and told riddles and lured you in with tales so captivating you wouldn't notice the acid melting away your limbs. But his favorite things to draw, for himself, are small, dark plants that thrive even without light and oxygen, growing wild and vicious and gleeful in the shadows, with retractable thorns and whirring razor sharp leaves. He makes them scrappy and smiley and he calls them Merryplants because he likes the sound of it, because it doesn't sound sad.

And maybe his views on vegetation are skewed by a lifetime spent on board spaceships with nothing green but lights on a screen, but it's what he knows.

"You're very good," Sanji says, double-tapping the screen to zoom in on a detailed fanged magnolia. Usopp had chosen to color it an obnoxious shade of purple, to convey noxiousness.

"I don't know. Chopper likes them at least."

"I like them too," says Sanji, in response to Usopp's unasked question. "They look like they belong in storybooks."

Sanji swipes his finger across the screen. Usopp grins down at his half-finished stew and takes another bite, feeling sated, and he thinks of those tall, yellow flowers, the ones with the sun in their name.


End file.
